In the design of
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
s, an erroneous program is one whose semantics are not well-defined, but where the language implementation is not obligated to signal an error either at compile or at execution time. For example, in
Ada
Ada may refer to:
Places
Africa
* Ada Foah, a town in Ghana
* Ada (Ghana parliament constituency)
* Ada, Osun, a town in Nigeria
Asia
* Ada, Urmia, a village in West Azerbaijan Province, Iran
* Ada, Karaman, a village in Karaman Province, ...
:
:In addition to bounded errors, the language rules define certain kinds of errors as leading to erroneous execution. Like bounded errors, the implementation need not detect such errors either prior to or during run time. Unlike bounded errors, there is no language-specified bound on the possible effect of erroneous execution; the effect is in general not predictable.
[''Ada Reference Manual'' ISO/IEC 8652:1995(E]
pdf
section 1.1.5.
Defining a condition as "erroneous" means that the language implementation need not perform a potentially expensive check (''e.g.'' that a global variable
refers to the same object as a subroutine parameter) but may nonetheless depend on a condition being true in defining the semantics of the program.
Notes
Programming language design
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